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A new Headstart (Israel’s version of Kickstart) project, which has already collected NIS 11,655 out of the NIS 25,000 requested ($3,000 out of $6,433), is a proposed annotated translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” one of the most infamous anti-Semitic documents which, like Hitler’s Mein Kampf has enjoyed a wide distribution worldwide. For obvious reasons, it never received a Hebrew translation, which would have been very useful in university History departments. A doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University whose area of research is the Aramaic translation of first century Rabbinic scholar Unkelus, Amsterdam explains his desire to translate and footnote the Protocols into Hebrew mostly because it’s time someone did it.

“To most Hebrew readers, the ‘Protocols’ is but a distant memory from the high school matriculation exam in History,” he explains along with his online pitch. “But few realize that this anti-Semitic work, with its wealth of internal inconsistencies, is still meaningful, and is being republished in many countries.” Amsterdam believes reading the Protocols is crucial to the understanding of the new anti-Semitism.

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“In a sense,” Amsterdam explains the need for his endeavor, “the Hebrew reader is traveling the world like Franz Kafka’s Joseph K in ‘The Trial,’ with an indictment pending against him that he does not know or comprehend.”

According to Amsterdam, the Protocols is a plagiarized work composed by the secret police in Czarist Russia in the late 1800s, to divert public attention from the empire’s economic woes to imagined outside enemies. The main source for the plagiarism was a 1964 satirical book lampooning the regime of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) in France. The forgers copied whole chapters from the original satirical work, dropped sections, and embedded the word “goyim” in many places, to give the impression the thing had been written by Jews.

The preface to the early editions notes that “The presumption is strong that the Protocols were issued, or reissued, at the First Zionist Congress held at Basle in 1897 under the presidency of the Father of Modern Zionism, the late Theodore Herzl. … [and Herzl’s diary] is an extremely significant bit of evidence bearing on the existence of the Jew World Plot and authenticity of the Protocols…”

The work is rife with wild inconsistencies, writes Amsterdam. The Jews in one place are in control of the world’s means of communications, in another they are urging each other to take over those means. In one place they are capitalists, in another sworn socialists. Their path to world domination changes from one segment to the next, from a military coup to a world war to an invited takeover following a civil war.

For Jewish elders with a supposed long record of plotting, the authors know very little about Jewish thinking. They have no notion of halakha, no discussion of the role the commandments play in a traditional Jewish mind. They also erroneously interpret the idea of a chosen people as a racial concept.

It is certainly a document that belongs on the bookshelf of every historian and in many other academic disciplines. Best of luck, Mr. Amsterdam, in turning hate into intellectual study — after all, it’s what we Jews have been doing since we left pharaonic Egypt…

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